Re: Charters, manifestos, and SPI's purpose, and forum-widening

On Mon, 14 May 2007, Josip Rodin wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 01:51:37PM -0700, Bruce Perens wrote:
> > The founders are myself and Tim Sailer. Our specific goal at the time
> > was to protect Debian developers from personal liability by giving them
> > a corporate shield. This purpose was not achieved, but IMO is more
> > important today than it was in 1998.
>
> AFAICT, it's more futile. If someone really wants to go out to sue
> Debian developers for doing what they do, the legal system in the US
> still allows them, and no matter how much money we got in the
> meantime, someone with money to waste on this purpose now likely has
> even more.
>
> So, since there's nothing that can save us in that game, other than
> popularizing common sense and the world becoming a better place,
> let's just keep trying never to play it?

Indeed; what is interesting too is the presence of such a corporate
shield with liability insurance means that if at the end of the day
the plantiff prevails the odds of actually getting paid is a near
certainty. That is certainly not the case when an individual can enter
bankruptcy or otherwise has little net worth at all.

Don Armstrong

--
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its
freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money it
values more, it will lose that, too.
-- W. Somerset Maugham

http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu